Posts Tagged ‘identi.ca’

Idiocracy

No one can have missed the outrageous idiocracy in Italy which simply left me with a single question:If they had warned, and panic had ensued, and people had gotten killed while trying to escape, and no quake would have hit… then what?… Seems like a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”…

The US is implementing a “six strikes” type of deal (similar to the ?now defunct? French HADOPI) and apparently the “independent expert” used to draft a “reasonable” law might not have been so independent as they should have… being a former RIAA lobbying firm… The corruption surrounding the copyright industry is truly sickening.

I am probably waaaay to paranoid, but this reeks offalse flag operation. Gotta keep the populus scared of them terrorists now don’t we?

More and more I am beginning to think that the correct course of action is to completely boycott anyone who use the DMCA since it is used as a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I think this comment sums it up pretty well.

Jeff Atwood wrote a post about the future of Markdown, and much have since been written and people have had opinions but from one of those discussions, what I found most interesting was Pandoc.

Stuff I learned

Great answer on how to better control node placement in a graphviz diagram.
And another answer on a similar question, although this should probably be considered an ugly-hack. Then again, there’s a time and place for everything.

Last week I prodded in some Perl code, and found myself unable to visualize just what the heck the internal structure of a variable looked like, and thought to myself Had this been PHP, I would have used var_dump(); I wonder if Perl have something similar?

This week I got to do some real work! Felt really good being able to start contributing back.

Identi.ca

It saddens me to say this, but identi.ca, having upgraded to version 1.0 of status.net (or is it laconica? iunno *shrug*) more or less sucks.

Now, I know how extremely easy it is to jump on the hate bandwagon, to just do what everyone else is doing, and I admit, several others have brought forth some valid critique, e.g. the new incomprihensible threading crap, renewed incentive for spammers to be on identi.ca, etc, but for my own part I’ve noticed it most prominently due to my third-party client being slowed to a crawl and crashing repeatedly while trying to use identi.ca.

Yes, a crashing client is probably not identi.ca’s fault, but hey, it worked well enough before the so called “upgrade”.

Do we, as a society, really have such a raging hardon for “innovation” and “new shiny stuff” that we’d rather break something which is working, to have something new, than stay stable?

I remember looking at an email tool (could it have been offlineimap? Probably not as it is actively maintained, thank you Luke ) and reading comments about it, someone stating that “oh, you can’t use that, development has ended, it is stagnant, abandoned.” I.e. there wouldn’t be any new versions… oh the horror. . .

If a software has met all the sought goals, the project can go down one of two paths:

go into maintenance mode, only releasing updates upon discoveries of bugs or when something (a protocol or whatever) is updated, and the software needs to support that as well, or

bloat up with new crap which it was never intended to handle

Yes, I am a huge supporter of the UNIX philosophy. Separation of responsibility is a good thing.

But anyway, I won’t be abandoning it, I might lower my usage of it, but I won’t increase my presence in some other “social media”.

Vim

For some reason or other, I found myself wanting to put quotes around a word which the cursor was presently centered on.

Now, the simple way (which is much quicker if you are just going to be quoting a few words) is of course just to use navigation commands to get to the front of the word, enter insert mode, input a quote, exit insert mode, move to end of word, enter append mode and insert a quote, rinse and repeat.

But I wanted to do it the the longer, more automated way (not that I had a whole lot of words in need of quoting, I just had one, but it was more about the learning principle than efficiency at that point).

So I thought up:

bve"ay:s/<CTRL>ra/"<CTRL>ra"/<ENTER>

Basically, what you do is go to beginning of word, enter visual mode, go to end of word, copy the selection into a named buffer (a), enter command mode and issue a subsitution command in which the selection is pasted in both the find and replace fields, but in the replace field surrounded by quotes.

It works, you can record a macro to perform these steps so that you only need to place the cursor on the correct word and call the macro.

However, I started wondering if there wasn’t a way to extract the value from a search. I.e. if you put the cursor on a word, and hit * you’ll tell vim to find all occurrences of the word under the cursor. This must mean that vim somewhere stores the sought after word.

I never found a solution for that, but I did however find a shortcut:

:s/<CTRL>r<CTRL>w/"<CTRL>r<CTRL>w"/<ENTER>

This one simply takes the word presently under the cursor, and pastes that. This too, works with macros, i.e.:

qq:s/<CTRL>r<CTRL>w/"<CTRL>r<CTRL>w"/<ENTER>q

This little “quotifier” is now stored in macro buffer q and can be accessed by pressing @q in command mode.

mscgen — I’m not sure how well I have been able to communicate that I like source code. I like being able to compile stuff or script stuff so that I can have reproduceable results. mscgen, I believe, uses graphviz to generate Message Sequence Charts, and I played around with it a bit this week when trying to outline how my little “brushing up on Erlang-project” should communicate internally.

How silly of me… I totally forgot to publish last weeks summary yesterday. So without further ado, only one day late:

bashPhotoGallery

I don’t know how I get myself into these things… all of a sudden I found myself needing a, reproducible, way of setting up a photo gallery, complete with thumbnails and affixing a content license to the images.

I am not all that fond of those UTM variables that some “services” tack onto their links in order to better track where people are coming from (I understand why they’d do it, but I have no interest in being tracked, even if all they want to know is whether or not their push to be visible on $SOCIAL_MEDIA_SITE_OF_THE_MONTH is successful.
I know that I by accident stumbled upon a blog post outlining how to get rid of them programmatically, and I also know that I for some reason or other couldn’t find it, but without being too paranoid, I can understand why Google might not want to help people find the knowledge to do that
In any case, I stumbled upon tworesources for doing just that, but I think that was more due to dumb luck than any concentrated effort on my part, actually, it was quite by accident while looking for something else.

Bash is so cool!

I already knew about echo {A,B,C,D} (great in conjunction with mkdir -p, but I have realized that bash is cooler than that.echo {A..D} delivers the same result, without the need to explicitly specify all of the chars I want expanded. Nice!

makefile blogging :: comments

psquid had a rather interesting solution to blog comments. I’ll have to think more about this. I don’t know how I feel about letting some other party (even if it is as nice a party as identi.ca) host “my” comments, but it is totally worth considering.

Wednesday

All in all a pretty good day. Got to assist razor with both vim and LaTeX skills (the student has become the master, yay!), got some writing out of my head, and ended up doing a little Test-Driven Python hacking.

And although I was a bit sceptical about OlofB‘s pyTDDmon, especially about it blinking continuously, which could get really old really fast, at first, I have to say that it has kindof grown on me since.

As I sat down in front of the computer today and started reading the identi.ca backlog I came across this gem, which lead here, about how to turn Vim into a Python IDE. The blogpost itself contained many useful tips/tricks (the code folding script being on the top of that list), but as is often the case, the really cool stuff gets unearthed in the comments, like this one about snipMate. Also, excellent video presentation is excellent!

That post also lead me to another post on that blog which inspired me to finally start looking into ctags, which is a two step installation, one being installing the package exuberant-ctags from the repository, and the other fetching this script.

All I need to do now is try to learn the key mappings M^e, f, M^f, and TT/F4 ;D oh, and to tab a lot ;D

This morning Identi.ca helped me learn something new about Vim; vimgrep. Granted, most, if not all, of these micro posts only point you in the right direction, then you need to actively go and search the knowledge out, which I did. Thesetwo pages in particular helped me out understanding how it works.

$ echo "# TODO:" > test1.py
$ echo "# TODO:" > test2.py
$ gvim

This just creates two files containing a “TODO” comment (i.e. something we wish to search for later), and starts up an instance of gvim. Then, inside gvim:

:vimgrep /TODO/gj ./*.py
:copen

This will search through all files in the current directory with the .py extension, looking for “TODO” and add the results to a list, which, if I have understood everything correctly, is called the quickfix list. :copen opens that quickfix list.

The result will be that the vim window is split in two, the upper window showing nothing (as we have yet to select one of the files listed in the window below), and the lower window listing all files matching the search.

The lower window will have focus, so just navigate to a file you wish to work with and hit enter. The file will open in the upper window, and that window will have focus now.

This is when I sat down and took the time to learn about “C^w k“, “C^w j” and “C^w o“. The first two are navigational, jumping up (k) and down (j) between the windows, while “C^w o” will close all but the window with focus. Nifty!